Vancouver SEO done the ethical, well researched way – keeping you in the loop

Hate it when a Vancouver SEO tells you their services will cost an arm and a leg, and you’re like, ‘why?’

Then you’ll like what you’re about to read.

Welcome to the world of task-based SEO billing!

I believe in the philosophy of customization – because no single SEO package is going to fit every business.

The truth that is seldom told is that many businesses don’t need every type of SEO tactic applied to their site. I mean, if it takes 10 hours to rank on top, why spend 20?

At the end of the month, you should know what was worked on, so you can see where your hours, and your dollars, are being spent to advance your SEO.

When it comes to doing Vancouver SEO, from now on, only pay for what you need!

A large portion of an SEO budget is taken up with time-consuming tasks such as writing lots, and lots of articles. For some business owners, writing is a breeze, and they enjoy doing it. So why make them pay me to write, when they can do it themselves?

I’m open to that type of budget control. And I always give an analysis to let you know what my best recommendations are, so you don’t waste your time trying everything under the sun. For example, your meta tags may be fine, but you might need to work on your backlinking and content a bit more.

Warning: Only go this route if you are committed to ranking well and seeing a return on investment!

Budget controlling by having me only do a part of the SEO work is more for the business owner that has time, but little resources. Therefore, I can’t always recommend work-sharing for the busy business owner (you know who you are!), since not getting your part of the work done could compromise the SEO effectiveness.

For the most part, however, if a business owner is tech savvy and interested enough, my services can complement their campaign.

Every business owner should know what they’re worth!

If you work the 40 to 80 hour workweek, and make $100 per hour, it would be SENSELESS to take care of your own SEO when you can subcontract it for half the rate.

Then you will see the cash reign in faster, doing what you do best and letting the experts do what they do best.

You would trust a CGA to take care of your taxes, because you know they know what they’re doing, and can do it a lot faster than you. Why not treat SEO the same way?

So, where do we start with SEO?

A company wishing to rank well, with reasonable competition online, should expect to spend about $420 – $560 per month towards their SEO initiatives (based on hourly rates). We would start with well rounded research, because if we don’t, we will spend every month trying to shoot an arrow in the dark, not knowing whether we’re targeting the most lucrative keywords for your site, and not knowing if our efforts are getting you ahead of your competition. With that said, the initial research phases include:

Keyword Research

This takes several hours where I pore over data using a keyword research and SEO software that not only tells me how many searches a day are being performed on certain keywords but also tell me:

Should we use the plural or singular form of your product or service for ranking? Believe it or not, sometimes this makes a difference.

Should we use another phrase or synonym that is searched for more frequently?

How many times is a target keyword used in conjunction with other words? This percentage will let us know how targeted of a phrase we are aiming at, or if we need to find the long-tail phrases and try to rank for those specifically, and individually.

How much competition is there for this keyword? Are your competitors trying hard to rank for the keyword without knowing it has a lesser search volume, or lower ‘broad’ usage than other words? If this is the case, you might be in a better position to target higher volume keywords with less competition, or even lower volume keywords with less competition, while the competition hacks away at a more difficult, less lucrative keyword.

Competitive Analysis

Yes, everyone needs this. This is not about your competitor’s brand or quality, or products or services. This is about their SEO condition, what they’re doing to try to rank, how far ahead of you they are in terms of SEO ‘brownie points’ with search engines, and what their weak points are, so you can try to outrank them in those areas.

Chances are you do not have this information handy (a lot of people tell me they don’t need this part, which is strange). You see, as explained by SEO Book, your SEO is only going to be as good as your competitive edge online (not just offline). In other words, you are competing for the ‘shelf space’ of the top spots on Google for a certain keyword. A company can be smaller in size, have less resources than you, and be starting out as a rookie in your industry BUT they can have a greatly optimized Web site which means they will outrank you on search engines. Google and search engines don’t care, and mostly don’t know how big and great of a company you are until you show it to them in your Web site, which is something their bots can actually crawl (there are no interviews or application processes for ranking on search engines, you just have to have a really good site….and no I don’t mean a well designed site).

That all being said your SEO Competitive Analysis will give us a benchmark by which we learn what we need to do as a minimum to get your site ranking.

SEO On-Site Audit

Once we know what keywords you should be targeting and what your competition is up to as far as SEO goes, we then need to take a look at your site’s current condition. Most times, this stage reveals that a lot of foundational, technical things need to change in your site’s development if it was not built with SEO in mind from the ground up (which is why I highly recommend people allow me to get their site developed for them…but it doesn’t always work for everyone). It also reveals a lot about your site’s content. Usually this is, by far, the number 1 problem I see with Web sites that do not rank. They usually have too little text, a lot of empty pages, text embedded into images (due to poor development standards) or worse, duplicate, plagiarized content that is preventing them from ranking well.

The SEO audit is not a full development review, so it won’t catch everything that needs to be fixed on a site, but it will give a pretty general idea of what’s going on in terms of why your site is not ranking well yet, or not ranking for particular keywords.

All of the above will take roughly 12 – 14 hours to complete (depends on the case), at current hourly rates, and could take longer if you need me to research more keywords than usual.

After that we will have a guideline for which to move forward with monthly SEO activities that YOU need for your Web site in particular. This could range from:

Setting up meta tags

Removing duplicate content

Fixing development issues that are preventing SEO ranking

Blogging and content writing

Link building

And more….

How much will SEO cost for my business?

All SEO is done by the hour and I recommend 6 hours a month as a healthy budget. You can chose more or less, it’s up to you, and how quickly you want to get ranking. It will not work to ask me to do 20 hours in one month and then nothing in future months – you can’t speed up SEO like that, it needs to be natural and steady, like the tortoise that won the race (that story has a lot of significance with SEO actually….).

Please note that all payments are non-refundable. I can never guarantee results, as no other SEO can either (if they say they can, they really don’t know what they are doing or are planning on spam techniques to get you up and out really fast OR they are planning to get you ranking for a keyword no one searches for and thus, has no competition).

How long will it take to get ranking?

No one can say for sure, and there are never guarantees that any of the work I do for you will result in ranking. There is too much out of the control of SEOs, most notably of which is the Google algorithm. It changes a lot, so what works today may not work tomorrow (literally it can be that fast). And what we know works is usually based on experience and research from people who have experience. If Google handed out their algorithm to everyone, it would be too easy to spam the system, which would result in a bad search engine, which would result in Google going out of business…so they’re not likely to reveal to us any time soon.

BUT – that being said, the time it usually takes to get ranking depends on a few factors:

a) your online competition in your industry – remember, your competition is the benchmark of the minimum work you need to do to rank well. If they are continually working on their SEO, and are already ahead of you, they will be ahead of you for a long time, until you pick up your game. In some industries there is little to no competition, so ranking is quite fast, within a week or two (I’ve seen).

b) your willingness to let me make changes to your Web site – if you are married to the way things are worded on your site, you may not like the SEO process so much. If everything that is written on your site or on the Web needs to go through layers of approval and editing by your company, then SEO will take a very, very, very long time, and it will feel like nothing is happening. The most successful SEO projects I’ve worked on, by far, where with clients who said “Joyce, I trust your expertise, I’m not married to my Web site, my goal is to get ranking,” and then they gave me free reign to do what I know according to research (I don’t make this stuff up – it’s not all opinions and creative ideas).

c) the most current Google rules and algorithms – it is getting harder and harder to rank, and Google is requiring Web site owners to show their worth, seriously. Even a good design and user experience matters now. More and more we are seeing that quality content is what gets rewarded by Google. And producing unique, quality content takes longer and is more expensive. But it pays off. So hint, hint, blogging is really critical to SEO. I strongly recommend you have a look at this ‘dynographic’ on how content marketing is making businesses money these days: http://www.mandloys.com/contentmarketing/

Keep in mind that the more targeted your key phrases are, the more likely you are to rank. So for example, trying to rank for “florist” will probably take years, because it is too broad. If you try to rank for everything, you will rank for nothing. BUT, if you target “florist in Vancouver” you will have a much easier time. And if you target “wedding florist in Vancouver” you will have an even easier time….and so on. The more specific the better.

Also keep in mind that Web sites do not rank – pages rank. So for every keyword you want to rank for, you need to create content focusing on that keyword as a ‘hub.’ In other words, a page about “wedding florist in Vancouver” as well as a page about “floral company Vancouver,” and so on. Please do not expect your home page to rank for several keywords unless you have invested years and years into your SEO, at which point you will eventually start to rank for broader key phrases (as time goes by).

My competitors used X technique to rank well, can you copy what they do and get me ranking tomorrow?

No.

Chances are they used an outdated, spammy technique that they could get away with when the Internet was the wild wild west and Google was not cracking down on spam as much as they are today, and which each hour that passes. OR, if this happened recently, you can expect them to be sandboxed soon – their ranking will not last long term.

If you want me to do spammy things to get your site ranking, or would like to tell me how I should do SEO for you (believe it or not, people try telling me how to do my job, ignoring every bit of research and data I give them), then I will not only have a zero effect on your SEO, I will ruin your chances of ranking for a long time. As a self-respecting professional, I would not ruin my reputation by doing such shoddy work.

So I repeat, the answer to this question is NO.

This sounds great, let’s get started with SEO Joyce!

Give me an e-mail shout for more details! Write to [me at joycegrace dot ca]. It should look like this when you type it into your e-mail program: